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Palestine Sauce Bourgeoise
Peel and cut a dozen Jerusalem artichokes into round balls, put them into a stewpan, and toss them over the fire with a little butter and sugar until well covered. Mix with the artichokes one-half tablespoonful of flour, then stir in slowly three teacupfuls of white sauce. Boil the artichokes very gently until quite tender, season the sauce with a small quantity of salt, thicken it with a liaison of eggs, and stir it briskly by the side of the fire, but do not boil it again. It is then ready for serving.
A classical garnish-sauce in which the vegetable is cooked in the sauce and the whole thing is finished with egg yolks. Two things decide whether it works: the yolks must never see a boil, and the artichokes must be tender before the yolks go in.
- The hinge: the liaisonA liaison here means egg yolks, usually two or three, loosened with a spoonful or two of cream. Temper them with a ladle of the hot sauce before returning them to the pan, keep the pan off direct heat, and hold the sauce below a simmer — above roughly 180F the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks.
- Jerusalem artichokesThese are sunchokes, the tubers of Helianthus tuberosus, unrelated to globe artichokes. Buy them firm; a dozen small ones is about 1 lb. Peeled flesh browns fast, so hold the cut balls in acidulated water until they go in the pan.
- Cut into round ballsThis is the classical tourné shape, pared with a small knife into even olives or spheres so the pieces cook at the same rate. The trimmings are worth keeping for soup; a knobbly tuber can lose a third or more of its weight to this treatment.
- TeacupfulTake it as about 6 fl oz, so three teacupfuls is roughly 2¼ cups of white sauce. The white sauce is a light velouté or thin béchamel — the half tablespoon of flour added to the pan is only there to bind the butter, not to build the sauce.
- Butter and sugarTossing in butter with a pinch of sugar glazes the surfaces before liquid goes in. Keep the heat moderate; sunchokes scorch more readily than potatoes, and burnt sugar will show through a pale sauce.
- Cooking timeGentle simmering brings the tubers to tenderness in about 20 to 25 minutes, depending on the size of the balls. Test with a knife tip rather than by the clock — undercooked sunchokes stay unpleasantly crunchy, and you cannot go back once the yolks are in.
- Yield and servingEnough to sauce four to six portions. It suits boiled or roast poultry and white meats, and it does not reheat: the yolks curdle on the second pass.
- One digestive noteSunchokes store their carbohydrate as inulin, which passes undigested and is notoriously windy for some eaters. Serve modest portions the first time.
In classical French kitchen language anything à la Palestine contains Jerusalem artichokes, a pun that runs back through the vegetable's own misnamed history: the plant is a North American sunflower relative, called girasole in Italian for its flower, and English ears are generally said to have turned girasole into "Jerusalem" — from which the French cooks of the nineteenth century took Palestine. Escoffier and his contemporaries codified a whole family of Palestine dishes, the soup best known among them, and bourgeoise signals the plain domestic finish: no purée, no straining, just the vegetable left whole in a sauce enriched with yolks. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book reflects how thoroughly the Waldorf kitchen of the 1890s worked in French idiom, and how much more common sunchokes were on American tables then than now, being cheap, hardy and easy to grow.